I’ve managed to get this three times so far (which makes it borderline spam, but I am on quite a few Mayoral and GLA lists) but it’s quite interesting reading.

One of the odd things about confidence in policing and fear of crime is that the biggest driver is not changing policing methods or tackling specific problems but communication and engagement. Even if everything else remained unchanged the levels of those two activities would affect public confidence.

You can sign up for the newsletter on the GLA website.

Category: Community Safety Tags: confidence, crime, GLA, Greater London Authority, Mayor, Metropolitan Police Authority, MPA.
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Although I usually use this last post of the week to witter on about the past week I’m going start off with an event two weeks ago.

Battersea Police Ball
I can’t believe I forgot to mention this last week, but on Saturday 28 November I attended, along with about 1,500 other people, the Battersea Police Ball. This is a fantastic annual event organised by the Battersea Crime Prevention Panel to raise funds for their work throughout the year.

As ever it was held in Battersea Park, and was a truly fantastic evening. It’s my 13th year of going and in all the time have never had anything but a great night out.

My congratulations to everyone involved in the organisation of the event.

Community Safety stall
Returning to the past week I spent some time on Saturday with the Community Safety Team who were manning, with the Shaftesbury Safer Neighbourhood Team and London Fire Brigade, a stall at Clapham Junction Asda. The purpose was to get out and offer advice (and a few freebies) to local residents. I posted earlier today about one incredibly positive aspect of their work and this is another.

Wandsworth Employment and Skills Partnership
In the middle of the week I chaired the Wandsworth Employment and Skills Partnership. The Partnership was set-up to try and improve joint working between everyone and to achieve some very challenging targets for getting people off benefits and into work.

Frankly, the recession has had a massive impact (the body and targets all pre-date the recession) but the body still serves a purpose. For example, during the meeting we discovered that Jobcentre Plus is ‘poaching’ people from a service we use to help long term unemployed people people back into work.

There’s nothing sinister about it, Job Centre Plus are now required to work more closely with the long term unemployed. But while that is a positive it means that the work that had already been done is lost as the Job Centre start from scratch. We’re now looking at whether we can prevent the poaching altogether, and if we can’t how we can ensure the unemployed person sees a progression, rather than getting halfway through one service to then have to start afresh with another.

Full council
Wednesday was the year’s last full council, and the year ended not with a bang but a whimper. It has to be said that the formal meetings of the council can be a bit, well, dull!

I’m tempted to suggest that it’s because the council is so well run it’s hard for anyone to disagree with what we do. But that isn’t the case. Despite only having one-sixth of the council seats the Labour group get, effectively, half the time of the council meeting to ask question and debate their issues. I don’t think the lack of spark at these meetings is for want of opportunity – but am at a loss to suggest why it isn’t there at the moment.

Police Borough Commander
I also had one of my regular meetings with Chief Superintendent Low, the borough police commander. These are useful catch-ups, making sure we both know what’s on each others minds and both sides are working together as well as they can. I believe (and I hope that he would agree!) the working relationship between the council and police has continued to get stronger over the years, and the fact that we are inner London’s safest borough reflects that.

Architectural Tour
And finally, last night was the council’s ‘Architectural Tour’. I did ponder whether I should include this or not, since it could be seen as cliquey or worse – but decided transparency is by far the best way to avoid that. Besides, on reflection I’m rather proud of it. I was one of the people who started it in 2002 and since then it has raised thousands for various supported by the Mayor each year, this year’s beneficiaries were the Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades, Scouts and Guides

The evening is, fairly simply, a tour combined with a quiz around various sites of architectural merit in Wandsworth, which all happen to be pubs. The council divides into tribal loyalties, with department pitting themselves against department (and councillors) and being able to host the trophy – and even the wooden spoon – for a year has become quite an honour to a department.

Congratulations this year go the Housing Department, who are not only one of the country’s biggest social landlords, but also fairly hot on music, literature history and able to take a good guess on how many animals in London zoo are of unknown sex!

(Incidentally, the zoo don’t know the sex of 13,811 of their 14,665 animals at the time of writing.)

Category: Community Safety, Politics, Regeneration, Wandsworth Tags: Asda, Battersea Park, charity, Council, Fire Brigade, JCP, Jobcentre Plus, Mayor, police, Police Ball, SNT, WESP.
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Last week I touched on the Labour gimmick of freezing council tax in the eight London boroughs they control and suggested that, actually, if you wanted value and quality services you were better sticking with Conservative authorities that already had a track record.

I failed to mention yesterday the Boris Johnson has again frozen the GLA’s budget. The second year he’s done it and, no coincidence, the second year he’s controlled the budget!

Compare this with Labour’s Ken Livingstone, who managed to double what he took from you over his eight years in office.

Category: London, Politics Tags: Boris Johnson, budget, council tax, Ken Livingstone, Mayor.
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I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that how the council is run is another of those subjects that those people involved, but no-one else, gets terribly exercised about.

Wandsworth currently runs a ‘Leader and Executive’ system. Every four years there’s an election – and residents choose 60 councillors. Those councillors then elect a leader (there’s an annual election for leader) who then appoints his cabinet. It effectively works the same way as national government.

My guess is that people are far more concerned about the council being run efficiently and effectively than the precise way it it run. The Government, however, think it’s very very important we ask again – largely, I suspect, because they are unhappy not that many people took up their ideas for directly elected mayors. Since the concept was introduced at the beginning of the century only twelve boroughs have opted for the directly elected mayor model. So the Local Government Act 2007 forces councils, once again, to consult on the model they operate.

The council is running its consultation in the current issue of Brightside and online at wandsworth.gov.uk/yourcouncil. Personally, I think the current system serves Wandsworth well, and hope you agree.

Under the current system Wandsworth has provided excellent services and the lowest council tax in the country – the simple fact is that the system of government isn’t the really important thing, it’s the ethos behind it.

Category: Politics, Wandsworth Tags: Cabinet, Executive, Leader, Mayor.
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Anne Robinson.

Fairly simple. I very much doubt I would have been able to vote for Anne Robinson if she’d been the Conservative candidate for London Mayor last year, as she claims she was asked. Now, of course, I’ve no idea what conversation took place, but there’s being asked and being asked. There can be few men who haven’t – at the wrong end of an evening in the pub – been suggested as a potential Prime Minister after outlining their schemes to solve all the country’s ills. Then again, most men don’t then do an interview with The Independent and throw in such comments to get a bit of publicity for their new chat show.

What worries me is that a supposedly reputable paper takes such an interview, then creates an article and an editorial out of it without really questioning it. Have we really become so obsessed with celebrity? That such comments are seen as perfectly reasonable, that celebrity is the prime qualification for political office?

Gordon Brown, after all, promised an end to the Blairite obsession with celebrity – then invited just as many D-listers as would accept to Downing Street. And this is perhaps the problem with Mayoral systems, that we end up considering not the candidates with the best executive experience, or the best policy ideas, but the candidate with the best name recognition.

[As an aside, if you do a Google image search for 'Anne Robinson' virtually every result is from the Daily Mail - which says something, though I'm not sure what.]

Category: London, Politics Tags: Anne Robinson, Boris Johnson, Mayor.
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As I reported in June the developers had requested the Mayor take responsibility for deciding their application to build a hotel on Falcon Road.

The Mayor has decided that he is content with Wandsworth Council taking the decision, meaning the council’s refusal of the application stands.

Legally, the Mayor has powers to determine applications if they are strategically important enough.  When the council’s planning department recommended refusal of the application to councillors the developers turned to the Mayor, claiming their hotel was of such importance he should be the decision maker.

There is a three step test the Mayor must apply: first, that the application has a significant impact on the implementation of the London plan; second, that there are significant effects on more than one borough; and third, that there are sound planning reasons for intervening.

His decision was that the hotel failed on all three tests!

The developer can still appeal to the Planning Inspectorate – which is the last option remaining to them.  If they do, all objections made to the council will be carried forward.

Category: Shaftesbury Tags: Boris Johnson, Clapham Junction, Falcon Road, hotel, Mayor, Mossbury Road, planning, Woburn House.
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Although the application for the hotel was rejected last night the developers are now appealing to the Mayor.

Any applicant has the right to appeal a decision, which will normally go to the planning inspectorate.  This is unusual in that it’s not, technically, an appeal, but instead a request that the Mayor takes responsibility for the decision (and presumably, having taken responsibility, approves it).

I’ll also confess I don’t really understand the motives.  The usual justification for asking the Mayor to rule on an application is because it impacts on his wider London strategies.  It’s hard to argue that London is in desperate need for more hotel capacity.

You can argue that Wandsworth needs more capacity – but that’s a Wandsworth, not a London, matter.

Another reason might be that the application has implications for more than one borough.  Again, it’s hard to see how, the site is some miles from the nearest border with Lambeth, and the size means it’s unlikely to have any effect on any of our neighbours.

I would hope this doesn’t get anywhere with the Mayor.  The developers best way forward is to work with the council to come up with an acceptable scheme, rather than touting the application around in the hope someone will eventually say yes.

Category: Shaftesbury Tags: Clapham Junction, hotel, Mayor, Mossbury Road, planning, Woburn House.
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Isn’t it odd to hear the Labour and Green Party GLA members belittling Boris Johnson’s council freeze because it will only save 11p a week on council tax? These are the same people who presumably believe that 2.5% off VAT will save the world.

What they fail to realise is that we finally have a Mayor who is serious about controlling the City Hall budget, and that’s good news that doesn’t just last until the end of next year.

In his 8 years as Mayor Ken Livingstone managed to double the precept City Hall took to run the GLA from £150 to over £300 – that’s about 11% a year. Assuming past record is a good indicator of future performance (and I reckon eight years is enough to get a handle on him) it means the difference between a Johnson and Livingstone mayoralty is that the average household will be £400 better off.

Category: Politics Tags: Boris Johnson, budget, Mayor, Politics, tax.
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